Difficult Women

[Roxane Gay] writes candidly, vividly, and necessarily . . . You will find it difficult to resist her flawless pacing [and] sharp, clear prose.” Ariel Gonzalez,The Miami Herald on An Untamed State

Award-winning author and powerhouse talent Roxane Gay burst onto the scene with An Untamed Statewhich earned rave reviews and was selected as one of the best books of the year by theWashington Post, NPR, the Boston Globe, and Kirkusand her New York Times bestselling essay collection Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial). Gay returns withStrange Gods, a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection.

The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. A pair of sisters, grown now, have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children, and must negotiate the marriage of one of them. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan for a job and faces the malign curiosity of her colleagues and the difficulty of leaving her past behind. From a girls’ fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Gay delivers a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Jamie Quatro, and Miranda July.

Roxane Gay is the author of the novel An Untamed State; the essay collectionBad Feminist; Ayiti, a multi-genre collection; and the memoir Hunger, forthcoming from Harper in 2016. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming inBest American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012,Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House,Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review,NOON, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Time, theLos Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. She is the co-editor of PANK.